Random thoughts on the blue highways.
You never know what you will find on the blue highways. Particularly when the choice at an intersection is controlled by the roll of a die. About the only rule is that highway onramps don't count as an intersection. You don't even have to roll the die. If one road looks interesting, go for it.

About Me

Don't look for me much on the big news sites, I skim through them, but rarely find much that is worth commenting on. As a young son once said "We don't watch TV news, dad won't let us watch violence programs." I still don't.
Interests are religion, marketing theory (that is not an oxymoron,) Advertizing, digital photography, APOD, and historically, rocket science.
e-mail: jcarlinbl@gmail.com
The literary version is found at Thinking On the Blue Roads
The raw data for which can be found on The Blue Roads of Thinking.

Saturday, November 7, 2015

The Incels are Restless

Today a growing segment of young adult males will not achieve the
material and social success necessary to be attractive mates and form
households. By way of comparison, a generation ago in his mid-20s my
father had a house, a wife, two kids and a stable job things I was
unable to achieve until my ’30s. ... Today Increased economic opportunity
and higher educational attainment for women has removed the economic
need to be tied down to undesirable dudes. This is a good thing for
almost everyone. But for those on the outside, however, it turns social
awkwardness and the tail end of the achievement bell curve into a prison
planet of isolation. And that generates rage.

note: "Incel" a name they call themselves, meaning "involuntary celibate."

Perhaps the rage comes from the tail end of the curve. The more concerning issue is that the middle of the curve for males is incel. (This may not be a new phenomenon.) Women now have control not only of not only who they will have a baby with but who they will fuck. Women it seems have little incentive to have sex per se, hence scriptural admonitions to "pleasure" their husband once a week. The cost of sex historically has been disproportionally high for women. Instinctively, killing a baby is not an option, and abortion was never socially acceptable and the cost both physically and monetarily was high. So perhaps the sin of Eve was discovering the "apple" method of contraception: Place an apple between your thighs and hold it there. That is a woman can choose not to have sex. This apparently worked fine in Eden, that is a stable agricultural or hunter gatherer society. Women could choose successful men to father their children, and space them naturally using the apple method until the child was weaned and productive. Much of this is speculative as stable agricultural and hunter gatherer societies by definition balance consumption and production, with not much left over for kings, priests, and exploitation. Thus they are easily victimized by kings, priests, and despots with plenty of warriors. Therefore few remain to study and all we have is oral history. The invention of exploitive societies demanded a ready supply of warriors. That is incels who substitute male bonding, possibly with voluntary or involuntary homosexual sex, and killing for sex. Men get used up rapidly in traditional warfare. In order to produce the required warrior/incels it was necessary exploit women as baby factories. Women became the property of successful men that is those who were not used up in war or those powerful enough to not have to go to war. Women's choice in such a society was to breed or starve. Encouraged both by social and religious pressure. In the west exploitive societies seem to have been invented by Abram's tribe, or perhaps his invention of God as the underlying justification for exploitation was the most successful. It has certainly been successful and threatens to take over the entire globe. However it has run out of people and things to exploit, and revolts by those exploited have begun to be successful.

The most successful revolt has been enabled by contraception, which allows a woman to choose between being a breeder of incels/warriors for a successful man or pursue some other path to social success which may or may not include reproduction. Note that prior to reliable female contraception career paths for women involved avoiding sex as they did not pay enough to support a family: Teaching, nannying, and other service occupations.

WWII used up enough men that women were introduced to "real" work to produce the war machinery, famously by Rosie the Riveter. Their success enabled different aspirations for some girls, who could prepare for careers other than the traditional service occupations and many chose to do so. Boys were still being conditioned for warrior/unskilled labor and generally discouraged from pursuing the "college track" except as athletes. Which leads us back to the incels perhaps as a majority in most of the west. The demand for warriors has dropped significantly recently, and unskilled labor no longer supports a family even the current norm of one or two children so the support for sex trade-off no longer works for a large segment of the male population.